Popular reviews

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  Review bymatt lynch ★★★★2

  Quite the jewel. Awash in primary color artificiality and sweat and smoke, this is some set-bound hothouse play, like Tennessee Williams reimagined as a grindhouse bloodbath, that roiling whirlpool of all-consuming self-loathing literalized as a man-eating crocodile in the front yard that keeps anyone from getting out alive. Awesome.

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  Review byTony the Terror ★★★★2

  I was in the mood for something sleazy and hadn’t seen this in forever so I decided to give it a revisit and it still holds up very well for me.

  Tobe Hooper’s 2nd film is just as scuzzy and dark asThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre although it’s not nearly as well known. Sure, it doesn’t pack the punch of that movie, but it still has a lot going for it: great sets and Argento-esque lighting, fun performances, plenty of tense moments, wonderfully creepy atmosphere, and a killer crocodile. Plus, it’s just sleaze-a-riffic with bayou brothels, swampside motels, and Robert Englund as a horny redneck asshole so really there’s nothingnotto love here.

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  Review byc h r i s ★★★★½2

  🐊 

  “Names Buck and I’m rarin’ to fuck” are the first lines muttered by a foul-mouthed baby faced Robert Englund! Yes yes yes! Shudder added this to their March line-up and I couldn’t pass up on another viewing of this swampy madness!

  Judd, the lonely lunatic redneck who owns Starlight Hotel in rural Texas massacres various people that step foot inside his property, feeds their bodies to his large pet gator that he keeps in the swamp beside his hotel! The lighting in this Hooper jam is full of psychedelic colors— it really feels like you’re watching an Argento nightmare, but instead of witches it’s just Judd and his man-eating crocodile friend!

  Eaten Alive is Tobe Hooper’s second horror offering, made…

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  Review byIan West ★★★★

  Batshit Tobe Hooper at it again. A lunatic runs a hotel on a swamp with his sinister pet gator. Calamity ensues. Oh yeah, Marilyn Burns is back screaming bloody murder the entire time while tied to a bed, and there’s some crazySuspiria lighting—plus a Young Robert England plays Buck, who likes to fuck. Manages to capture a manic energy doused in humid swamp juice quite nicely, the mood here is great and that signature Hooper intensity is perfectly cast yet again.

  I love this whacko movie—can’t believe how much toilet swill gets tossed at this by dime store eberts and self proclaimed iconoclast gatekeepers. Oof.

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  Review bySilentDawn ★★★5

  55/100

  One of the most textured, rotten films that I've ever seen, so of course, it's a typical Tobe Hooper movie. Unrestrained to a fault,Eaten Alive could've only been made after the success of something likeThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the no holds barred horrors of this oddity is worth a watch, if only for Hooper's impeccable eye for staging and a fucking crocodile swimming within its depths.

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  Review byLiz ★★★★½

  The pure insanity of the final act of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, but sustained for 90 straight minutes and channeled through an intentionally visibly artificial technicolor Mario Bava adaptation of a grimy Tennessee Williams stage play. Also, there's an alligator.

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  Review byJude1

  in which the murder of a sex worker stains the entire world blood-red, and the Nazi flag sits only a few feet away from its American counterpart. genre filmmaking at its most abrasive and electric.

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  Review byAaron ★★13

  Part ofHoop-Tober

  “Daddy’s off to slay the dragon.”

  They were lost.

  They were driving, driving endlessly, and they were lost. Their daughter was increasingly agitated—a child can handle only so much time cooped up in a hot car. The dog was barking and pacing the back seat restlessly. They were sniping at each other, the dank, dreary heat exposing fault lines long simmering in their marriage. The roads were poorly marked, the map was no help, the countryside all looked the same, all brushy and marshy and rundown. If only they could find somewhere to stop, if for no other reason than to stretch their legs and use the bathroom.

  Finally, a hotel. A dilapidated shack, really. Filthy, nearly…

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  Review byNaughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★1

  Tobe Hooper's southern gothic really did a number on me! Feeling darnright dirty doesn't even begin to describe how I feel right now!

  There are some things you just can't wash off, I don't care what kind of showerhead you have installed! Judd's (Neville Brand) a man in a whole world of imaginary hurt, a psychotic gone unchecked spirals deeper into the pitch black abyss! The only living breathing thing he can even begin to relate to is a ravenous crocodile! You see it takes a predator to recognize a predator! A sick and twisted symbiotic relationship blossoms ultimately resulting in the loss of Judd's leg! Like Judd the Croc can't go against his nature! And Judd understands this all too well!

  Tobe Hooper has a real talent for perverse and depraved World building, so authentically nasty viewers should be required to wear a full body condom to prevent the onslaught of a particularly aggressive and debilitating contamination!

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  Review byELECTRICWIZARDx ★★★★½11

  The haunted house/sideshow amalgamation of torment that exists in the afterlife of the world of TCSM. This isn't hell, because that would imply the existence of a heaven in this world. Instead all that exists after death is a twilight purgatory of decay and all roads outwards leading back, populated by unhinged carnies dripping with sweat and unkempt psyches. They never break character.

  The woodrot holds sordid nastiness and dilapidation solid and firm, thick like a grease made from contempt, dust and screams. Paint would never take on these walls. The atmosphere is impermeable and rife with a mean and twisted sadism. Deviant sexual repression eats away at minds, and the outbursts stemming from internal mental torture and evil nature…

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  Review byJustin Decloux ★★★★

  Crocs rule.

  If TEXAS CHAINSAW is heralded for its realism, Tobe Hooper’s decision to go in the absolute opposite direction with his follow-up should be marked down in history books as a stroke of genius. EATEN ALIVE was essentially a gun for hire job, but Hooper pushes everything to their wild extremes to keep himself interested. Nothing is real. Everything is shot on a set. The colours are vivid. The melodrama mega-sized southern gothic. The pacing is all over the place, with the most intense sequence arriving near the end of the first act, but things are kept fresh as the sloppily re-written script goes haywire.

  When William Finley moaning like a high pitched whistle isn’t the weirdest thing in a movie, I consider that a plus.

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  Review byBlake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★★★10

  "Eaten Alive" is a 1976 horror film directed by Tobe Hooper. Being sequentially the second film in his filmography right after the infamous "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974), "Eaten Alive holds a lot of that same early raw energy that Hooper used to polarize the viewing audience, dipping them in to a constructive setting of mayhem and chaos. Still using the hicksploitation tone that is perfected in "Texas Chainsaw", "Eaten Alive" moves the setting to a backroads motel of a swamp in lower Texas. Here further extreme personalities constructed through societal isolation are further explored, as our central mad man named Judd lets an assortment of equally obscure and sometimes crazed personalities take residence in his motel, usually becoming food…